The Sales Archaeologist

Perhaps you have heard about the latest scandal involving for profit colleges and universities? It is all over the news and the web – you can read a little about it here  and here if you are not up to speed on the story. I however am not going to focus on the details of the entire scandal: I am going to talk about the way sales tactics have played a role and making the case that these outdated methods have finally passed their expiration date. Paul Richlovsky did a great job blogging about this already here and he is not even a sales guy. Just worthy to note that I am not the only one to make this connection.

When I watched a report on television they actually used undercover cameras to see how the college recruiters went about getting people to sign up – the quest was to see if they were honest with the students, I watched in horror. The recruiters had clearly been through some sales training and they had mastered some tactics – the bad news was that looking in from the outside they didn’t look like tactics.

As an educated expert in sales development I recognized these techniques as verbal contracts, meta-phrasing, reversing and an all-out attempt to squeeze someone into the pain funnel. The reporter, the rest of America and the Legal System have a different word for these techniques; they kept using the words fraud, deceit, lack of honesty, intimidating and even bullying was used! Do you or your sales people want to sell like that? Do you want your client to feel like those students? Is that relationship building or establishing advisor status? Is the goal to irritate the client into buying?

Watching the interchange between potential student and sales person (recruiter) I have to say that as a sales development professional I was embarrassed by the behavior. It was nasty and whoever provided the training has nothing to be proud of.

Does this mean the submarine is sunk? Well all I know is that if I was a decision maker and I was watching these reports that associated these tactics with all manner of "no good" and then a sales person showed up at my office and tried using them - well I think you know what would happen.

They also interviewed a former recruiter and role played with a potential candidate – he showed how he avoided questions and kept going back to “the pain” he explained that his goal was to “exploit” the pain and if there was no pain to create pain.

I understand the idea and the concept of pain and I agree that it has its place. But there are rules and the problem with teaching only a tactical and technique based approach is that the rules are often not addressed. People cannot execute the balance and obviously have difficulty taking the moral high ground as they attempt to execute these methods. Meta-phrasing comes across as putting words in their mouth, reversing comes across as not listening properly, pain comes across as exploitation and the entire process ends up looking dishonest.

Selling should be natural, involve mutual respect and most importantly put the prospects needs ahead of your own. I don’t see how selling pain accomplishes anything more than alienating the client - and for many of these Schools the potential of a lawsuit or becoming part of a federal investigation.